영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Individuals confronted with a set of options frequently ①default to whichever alternative requires no active decision at all, a tendency scholars term the status quo bias. Rather than weighing the merits of each available choice afresh, decision-makers often treat the current arrangement as a reasonable baseline simply because it already exists, even when ②switching would plainly serve their interests better. This pattern becomes especially apparent in contexts where enrollment in a program ③depend on a default setting. When employees must actively opt into a retirement savings plan, participation rates remain stubbornly low; yet when the same plan is presented as automatic unless an employee opts out, participation rises dramatically, despite the fact that the underlying financial terms ④are identical in both cases. Two forces appear to drive this asymmetry: first, the cognitive effort required to evaluate alternatives, and second, an aversion to the potential regret that ⑤might follow an active decision that turns out poorly.

For decades, most vaccines worked by injecting a weakened or inactivated version of a pathogen, coaxing the immune system into recognizing an enemy it had never fought. mRNA vaccines take a different route, delivering a short genetic instruction wrapped in a protective lipid capsule, one that tells the body's own cells how to manufacture a harmless piece of a virus's outer surface protein. Once those cells display the fragment, the immune system learns to recognize it as foreign and builds a defense, without ever having encountered the actual pathogen. Because the vaccine contains no live virus and cannot alter a cell's own DNA, _______________. This speed, first proven on a global scale during a recent pandemic, has convinced many researchers that the same platform could eventually be adapted to fight diseases far beyond infectious illness.

A rational approach to decision-making dictates that only future costs and benefits should influence a choice, since resources already spent cannot be recovered regardless of what is decided next. In practice, however, people routinely allow such irrecoverable expenditures, known as sunk costs, to shape their subsequent decisions, a pattern referred to as the sunk cost fallacy. Economists therefore urge decision-makers to evaluate each choice based solely on its prospective outcomes, treating past expenditures as ___________ to the decision at hand.

Working memory refers to the mental workspace in which information is temporarily held and manipulated while a person performs a cognitive task. Such tasks include solving an arithmetic problem, following a rapid conversation, or holding a phone number in mind before dialing it. In the mid-twentieth century, the psychologist George Miller proposed that this workspace could accommodate roughly seven discrete items. His claim proved so influential that it became widely known as the magic number seven. Subsequent research, however, revealed that Miller's estimate was somewhat generous, since it failed to account for the complexity of the material being remembered. Nelson Cowan later argued that when rehearsal strategies are prevented and attention is tightly controlled, _______________. This discrepancy suggests that what earlier studies had measured was not raw storage capacity itself but a hybrid quantity inflated by clever strategies. Contemporary psychologists therefore distinguish between the fixed limit of working memory and the flexible techniques that allow individuals to transcend that limit.

Imagine two travelers preparing for the same trip: one refuses to fly after watching news coverage of a recent plane crash, while the other books a flight without hesitation. (A) This tendency, in which people estimate how likely an event is based on how easily examples come to mind rather than on actual data, quietly shapes countless everyday decisions. (B) Statistically, air travel remains far safer than driving the same distance by car, yet vivid, emotionally charged images tend to dominate human judgment more powerfully than dry statistics ever could. (C) News broadcasts that repeatedly feature rare disasters can leave viewers convinced that such events are common, even though official records clearly show the opposite. Advertisers and politicians alike exploit this pattern, knowing that a single striking anecdote often persuades audiences more effectively than pages of careful statistics ever manage to. Recognizing why memorable examples overshadow objective probability therefore matters, both for making sound personal choices and for noticing when public fear has drifted far from measurable reality.

Cognitive psychologists distinguish between two modes by which the mind handles information, a distinction that helps explain why experienced drivers can hold conversations while navigating familiar roads without conscious effort. (A) Skills that once required intense concentration, such as reading or typing, gradually become automatic through extensive practice, freeing attentional resources for other purposes. This shift explains why novice drivers find it difficult to talk while merging onto a highway, whereas seasoned drivers manage the same maneuver with comparative ease. (B) Automatic processing occurs rapidly, requires minimal attention, and typically operates outside conscious awareness, allowing multiple automatic tasks to proceed without interfering with one another. Controlled processing, by contrast, unfolds more slowly, demands deliberate attention, and can generally handle only one demanding task at a time, since it draws upon a limited pool of cognitive resources that becomes rapidly depleted under competing demands. (C) However, automaticity carries hidden costs, since automatized responses can be triggered inappropriately by habitual cues even when circumstances have changed, occasionally producing errors that controlled deliberation would have prevented.

The adoption of behavioral insights into government policy has not proceeded without institutional resistance. (A) Career civil servants accustomed to designing programs around traditional levers, such as financial penalties or public information campaigns, have sometimes questioned whether small changes in wording or presentation could meaningfully influence outcomes that seemed to demand more substantial intervention. (B) Skepticism began to diminish, however, as rigorously controlled trials demonstrated measurable improvements in outcomes ranging from tax compliance to vaccination rates, providing evidence that traditional advocates could not easily dismiss. (C) As a result, many governments now require that new behavioral interventions be tested through randomized trials before wider implementation, a practice that has simultaneously built credibility for the approach and generated a growing body of reliable evidence.

Classical economic theory long assumed that decision makers gather all relevant information, calculate every possible outcome, and select the single option that maximizes their benefit. (A) Herbert Simon, however, questioned this assumption, arguing that human beings operate under real constraints of time, knowledge, and mental capacity that make such exhaustive calculation practically impossible. (B) Instead of searching endlessly for the theoretically perfect choice, people typically stop once they find an option that seems good enough to meet their immediate needs, a strategy Simon termed satisficing. (C) A shopper comparing refrigerators, for example, rarely examines every model available; she instead sets a few practical criteria, such as price and size, and selects the first appliance that satisfies them adequately. This approach is not a failure of reasoning but rather a sensible adaptation to a world where information is costly and time is genuinely limited. Consequently, models assuming unlimited rationality often fail to predict actual behavior, while frameworks acknowledging these cognitive boundaries offer a far more realistic account of how ordinary decisions are actually made.

주어진 문장: The first of these, often called System 1, operates beneath conscious awareness, shaping judgments before a person even realizes a decision is being made. Psychologists studying human judgment often describe the mind as operating through two distinct systems rather than a single unified process. ( ① ) System 1 works quickly and automatically, generating impressions and snap judgments without any noticeable sense of effort, much as a driver instinctively brakes when a ball suddenly rolls into the street. ( ② ) System 2, by contrast, is slow, deliberate, and demanding, engaged only when a problem requires careful calculation or conscious reasoning. ( ③ ) Most daily decisions are handled almost entirely by System 1, which allows people to function efficiently without exhausting their limited mental resources. ( ④ ) This efficiency comes at a cost, however, because System 1 relies on simple shortcuts that can produce systematic errors, and System 2 is frequently too lazy or too occupied to double-check them. ( ⑤ )

주어진 문장: These two findings together suggested that the key to durable memory was not the sheer amount of repetition but the timing of that repetition. In the late nineteenth century, the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus undertook a rigorous investigation of forgetting by serving as his own experimental subject. He memorized thousands of meaningless three-letter syllables so that prior knowledge could not skew his results. ( ① ) After learning each list to perfection, he tested his retention at intervals ranging from twenty minutes to a month later. He recorded how many repetitions were required to relearn the material each time. ( ② ) The resulting curve revealed a consistent pattern. Forgetting proceeds rapidly during the initial hours following learning, then gradually decelerates until the rate of loss becomes almost imperceptible. ( ③ ) Roughly half of the acquired information vanished within the first hour alone. Yet whatever survived that initial plunge tended to persist for much longer periods. ( ④ ) Ebbinghaus further found that distributing study sessions across several days produced better retention than cramming the same repetition into one sitting. ( ⑤ ) This finding, now central to modern learning theory, implies that revisiting material shortly before it would otherwise be forgotten interrupts the decline of the forgetting curve.